Have you ever wanted to launch your own instant messenger, like WhatsApp or Kik? Accumulating thousands of users in your app?

LuxChat gives you the possibility of doing this. It is a complete instant messenger application built for iOS (iPhone, written in Objective-C), very similar to Whatsapp and Kik or even Facebook’s well-known iOS messenger app. Users are able to send instant messenges to other users and add their friends as their contacts to the app. Besides sending simple text messages, you can also send photos and videos, or even stickers.

And in case no image can express what you want to say, you can simply send an audio message to your friends or share your location with them.

LuxChat also features an online indicator system, showing you who of your friends is currently online, and who currently isn’t. And when sending a message, you will automatically see when the other user reads it, because LuxChat has a built-in read receipt system.

With LuxChat, you also have the possibility to create large chat groups with no caps in the number of people you put in the group. Additionally, you have an extended settings page at your disposition, where you can decide if you want to receive notifications, show your online status or send read receipts. In the settings page, you can also personalize your profile and see the users you blocked because they simply got on your nerves.

And the best thing is yet to come: LuxChat really is instantaneous! It has been built with Parse (see note below!) and Firebase, driving the latency of the messages down to about 100ms for your messages to arrive. Additionally, LuxChat offers high security standards – every connection to the backend is made via SSL to offer your users very high security standards.

Launching and sustaining your own messenger project does not have to be expensive. With LuxChat, you can launch your private messenger for free and don’t need to pay a single dollar to sustain it. As the backends of this project, back4app (using Open Source Parse API) and Firebase, have free plans, you are basically able to run this project with no costs at all, and still have all the features available. Both backends also have cheap paid plans, in case you need more space or simply have more users than thought (basically a good thing, no?).

Want to see this project live? Download it [here](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/luxchat-private-messenger/id1051900871?l=de&ls=1&mt=8) from the AppStore.

This project enables you to launch your own instant messenger for iOS. Here is a short list of some of the main features you’ll get when downloading it:

This is what a normal user will get
• Instant text messaging to other users (latency of 100ms)
• Send photos, videos and stickers
• Send audio messages
• Send messages from outside of the app
• Share your location to other users
• Login via Facebook or your email address
• Create group conversations, give the group a name and a group picture
• See who is online with the online indicator system
• Receive notifications when you get a message (even In-App-Notifications)
• Block users who are getting on your nerves
• Personalize your profile and private settings
• See who of your phone contacts has already registered and add your friends as your contacts to the app

And here are the features you, as administrator of the project, will get
• Instant messenger with Parse API (installed on back4app) and Firebase as backend (both services have good free plans, so you don’t have to pay a single dollar to launch and run this project)
• See all your user data and messages in your database
• Great and well-documented code that is easy to customize and modify according to your personal needs
• Complete documentation and Getting Started Guide of the project, guiding you through the setup of the app and the basic features of the project

The project comes with a Getting Started Guide that helps you in case you have any questions. However, if you still have some questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me, I’ll be happy to help you.

This project has been built using some third party libraries. Here are the most important of them: